Generic Witty Post Title

Life has been very weird the last few weeks/month. Long periods of isolation and boredom interspersed with brief moments of diversion. I suppose I'm a fairly introverted person, and enjoy being alone, but only to a point. I have no TV, no phone, no car, no neighbors or friends nearby. I'm one of maybe a few thousand people on earth making a decent living playing a silly game on a computer. Definately not the place I would have imagined myself being five years ago.

Darren and I have taken to watching Very Weird Movies lately. A few pseudo westerns to start out, the first was Dead Man with Johnny Depp. He plays a city bred accountant or some like that moves to the west to work for a mining company. A weird introduction to the town has him fleeing for his life into the wild, where he meets a crazy outcast Indian who helps him turn from a bookish city slicker into a badass gunslinger. The story makes little sense, and without the hotness of Johnny Depp would have nothing to offer. But the evolution of his character is fun to watch. Then I picked up a movie called West of Heaven, South of Hell with Dwight "The Ugliest Motherfucker Ever" Yoakam, who you may know from such country hits as Streets of Bakersfield and Readin', Writin' and Route 23. Ok, so country music is as ugly as he is. But I enjoyed his acting in Sling Blade and Panic Room, so I thought this might be good. He plays a retired Army hero turned Federal Marshall, and the story centers around a conflict between him and his criminal foster family. Again, the story makes little sense, and the acting and dialogue are very poor, though watching Dwight Yoakam play a sensitive but rugged cowboy was worth it. I'm still confused though, since I found the movie under the Westerns section, not the comedy section.

A few nights ago it was Hiyao Miyazaki's Howl's Floating Castle. Same guy that made Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and the weirdest movie I've ever seen, My Neighbour Totoro. Lot of the same imagery and characterizations, and enjoyable, but still very asiatic and weird. Then we saw Bob Dylan's Masked and Anoymous. This is one of those movies that demands an immediate and visceral reaction. At face value, it seems like a monumental depiction of self-masturbation by Dylan. Every character has something memorable and loving to say about the music of Jack Fate (Dylan's pseduo-character). And we're talking big name actors. Jeff Bridges, John Goodman (thought this was going to be the Big L 2 for a minute), Luke Wilson, Penelope Cruz, Mickey Rourke, Christian Slater, Chris Penn, Giovanni Ribisi, Cheech Marin, Jessica Lange, Val Kilmer, a few others who I forget at the moment. Admist this blatant hero worship, the movie is rife with dime store philosphies and platitudes. There's also an overarcing political and religious theme centered around the nature of place and the life of the common man. The movie is set in no particular place and time, though we're led to believe the period is slightly in the future, admist a war torn and economically collapsed third world America. Very few white people are seen in the movie save for the main actors, and the locations at times remind you of Mexican border towns, small African villages, asian markets, etc.

It's an easy movie to make fun of, but since it's so blatant, I feel like credit should be shown to the writers, and maybe there's more to the movie than you first notice. There are so many cliche and overused themes that run through the movie, such as the role of alchohol and tobacco, prostitution, and other vices, political oppression, the insignificance of the powerless worker, and the corruption of the powerful, and every character has his moment to wax philosophical over them. But there are also several aspects to the story that receive less obvious attention, and seem to be the real point of the movie. The vagueness of time and place, the implicit connections between the characters and their interactions that are never really explained. So I tend to think it's either an amazingly clever and well made movie, or it's one of the most meaningless piles of drivel ever created. It was certainly painful to watch at points though. And Dylan's music is good, but uh, not as good as he thinks maybe (?)

Someone suggest a good and interesting movie to me. One that makes sense.